For entertainment, when he wasn’t third-wheeling himself into watching movies with his roommates, he did what he could afford to do: walk. Three or four miles in, he could forget that he didn’t have much money or that he’d gotten fired from the bar for a completely bullshit reason and just focus on the act of moving down the street. But eventually he’d end up at home, a place where the water stains on the wall reminded him that a hurricane had come for him there, and the plants reminded him that he was fucking up the vibe of the apartment by not having a girlfriend too. Or friends, really, since the nocturnal bartender life had put him out of touch with all the people he used to hang out with who worked during the day.

  After he met Brittany and they sold enough coffee to get their money together, he saw the house on Vanderbilt as a chance for him to become someone else. A coffee roaster. A respected businessman. A person whose life didn’t depend on the financial generosity of his banker roommate. Someone who flipped off all the assholes who let him drop into the flooded portion of his life without offering him a lifeboat. A person who didn’t need people he didn’t live with.

  Even if it was mostly Brittany’s parents’ consulting money that bought the place, the two of them had their business. Their blood and sweat. Their joint trips on airlines that dipped ticket prices by not allowing checked luggage on flights to Honduras and Brazil and Colombia to source beans, where Brittany tried to seem as social as possible without saying anything and Aaron did most of the talking, because years of bartending had left him completely cool with making conversation with people he’d just met, and he wanted to be the Black guy in the white world of specialty coffee. The guy you could trust because he looked more like the people who grew the beans, even if no one in business really trusted anyone else.

  He went to Colombia and Uganda and Jamaica and met growers and listened to their speeches on growing conditions. He bent down to smell fresh coffee beans. He offered to pay growers just a hair more than they’d been getting from other roasters. He shook hands and held babies and ate dinners in growers’ houses and explained how he and Brittany had come to form a company. Their chance meeting in the coffee shop he worked at after she’d angrily hung up on a yoga mat buyer who had called her to cancel his monthly order. Their collective confidence that they could make coffee better than the shit they were drinking. “Too bitter,” Brittany said. “Over-roasted,” Aaron said, remembering the years-long piecemeal lecture one of his bar customers had given him about coffee, and the thrill when he finally started to taste everything the guy told him existed in a cup.

  Meeting her was the highlight of his time at that coffee shop. He’d just eased into the boredom that set in after the morning rush when she came in. She ordered a small black coffee, and they got around to talking about how terrible, but cheap, the coffee was, and how she loathed selling yoga mats and wanted to have a business she didn’t hate.

  “Have you ever dealt with yoga people?” she asked him.

  “Nope.”

  “They’re a cult. They sweat on the mats and send them back. They send me shots of themselves doing yoga on my mats, and then they send me follow-up shots where they give those same damn mats one-star reviews. They meet up in the comments on my site to tell each other how to do yoga better, like I’m running a recipe blog. They show up at the stores that sell my mats when I’m dropping off fresh supply to poke them like they’re worried the cake isn’t done yet.”

  Before the yoga mats she’d taught yoga herself, part-time. “I didn’t bend well enough to get bumped up to forty hours of stretching under hot lights a week.” Before that she’d sold shoes. “All feet figure out their own way to be ugly.” Before that she’d worked for one of those firms that sold weird financial instruments no one understood until the crash, when everyone decided on the exact same day that weird financial instruments were worth nothing. In between jobs, she’d interviewed for what felt like hundreds of other jobs, “but I probably never smiled enough.” She couldn’t put on the pleasantness that gets women hired. She didn’t put exclamation points on her emails or try to make other people seem comfortable beyond bringing up what they might have in common, but even if she had, she feared her five-ten, dark-as-hell self wouldn’t pull off that just-saw-a-puppy vibe people seemed to want out of her.

  She was born without a smile, and it suited her, Aaron thought to himself from behind the counter where Brittany stood, tracksuited and determined, at peace with having no chill. Another customer came in, and he wandered back over to the cash register to take their order. After he turned out a mocha with enough extra hazelnut syrup to make it undrinkable, he looked back over at the table where she typed, and she looked up at him with the kind of relaxed face that might have passed for a smile on someone else.

  She kept coming back to the shop. He looked at her jaw and her arms and face and kept the conversations to coffee, because hooking up with her would feel great, but getting out of 9th and C would feel so much better. A couple of months into their coffee business he congratulated himself for successfully tamping down the cruder version of himself that might have thrown their arrangement away for a shared night on a mattress.

  She went over to his apartment and met the roommate and the roommate’s girlfriend, and he went over to her place and met her optimized soy protein bars, which were called Life Preservers, and her nunchucks, which she nicknamed Bertha after her mother and kept mounted on a wall for easy access just in case. “I lost so many jobs and so many friends who didn’t want to hang out with someone who didn’t have a job,” she said, “so I only have me, and I decided to protect myself.” And as a person who’d gone through enough trying to get jobs and getting blown off by his more successful friends to feel like he only had himself, he understood her completely.

  She came up with the coffee bag design. At first it freaked him out, but after looking at it a couple more times, he found it funny. People would see that guy running away from doom with a gun and a full cup of coffee, and they’d laugh too, he figured. Then they’d buy it. And they did. Tactical Coffee was written up for the quality of the coffee they sold, sure, but no one could resist the bag’s design. “Delicious coffee packaged in a delightful satire of our culture of overwork,” one newspaper said, sending thousands of coffee bag design enthusiasts to their website.

  The business bloomed into a brownstone with a second-floor roaster for Aaron, a first-floor bedroom Brittany could use as an office, and three upstairs bedrooms that dropped their morning commute down to a set of stairs. On move-in day, Aaron thought about the hundreds of employers who had rejected him and Brittany. All the workplaces they mysteriously didn’t fit into. The emailed dings. The nonresponses. The looks that interviewers gave him when he showed up, as if he were an alien sent to fifth-dimensionally destroy their jeans department. All of those nos that had turned into a house. After dropping off her last bedroom box, Brittany went into her bathroom, shut the door, looked into the mirror, and thought pleasantly about how she would never bother to smile for anyone ever again.

  Brittany spent that first fall they lived in the house digging out a corner of the backyard to build a bunker. “The ground’s going to go hard in January, and then we’ll just be stuck if anything happens,” she’d told him before she bought a spade and some sheet metal and started spending her weekends outside. “There are so many bunker-building videos on YouTube,” she said, when Aaron reminded her that she’d just broken the handle off one of the kitchen cabinets and glued it back on so crooked it looked like a unicorn horn. When she was a kid, she’d built Barbie houses, and gingerbread houses, and wooden shacks in shop class instead of the candleholders they were supposed to make. The wooden shacks could hold pencils or pens or spare change, instead of merely candles, assuming nothing dropped through the mysterious holes in their bottoms. But she was a better builder now. She could build a bunker that didn’t have holes in it. “I’m just going to will my way through it,” she said anytime he didn’t make his bunker-building objections specific enough.

  Aaron chewed on a Life Preserver, which didn’t taste that bad if he spent less time thinking about just how bad it tasted. He watched Brittany dig from the back window of the roasting room, which became his favorite place in the house almost immediately after they set it up. One silver roaster new enough for its gleam to brighten his mornings when he walked in to remove the beans that had roasted the previous night. A couple stacks of twelve-ounce bags with his company’s logo on them, ready to be packed with coffee beans and shipped. His company. The company that had saved him from a future where only a few inches of rising water stood between him and a total breakdown. All he had to do was fight off the quarter of his brain that feared a bunker would turn them into the armed guy on the bag front. The pile of dirt next to the hole Brittany dug grew to pumpkin height. Bicycle height. Aaron told himself it was a basement extension, then a cellar, as if either of them knew anything about cellars. But when Brittany insisted it was a bunker often enough for him to give up pretending, he switched to assuming they’d never actually go down in it.

  “It’s a hobby,” Brittany would say anytime Aaron seriously attempted to ask her about where she was going with the whole survivalist thing. She always held a spade in her hand and had a handkerchief tied around her forehead that matched that day’s tracksuit.

  “But a hobby is playin’ chess or knittin’ or pickin’ up the guitar.”

  “We only do this part of the time, unless, of course, something happens.”

  “It feels more like all the time.”

  “You have a go-bag. You have a plan. And besides, you don’t want to get stuck in another hurricane again. Or do you?”

  She gave him the look. It always turned him back into the broke guy living in the apartment with the bathtub in the kitchen on 9th and C who’d been reduced to hiding from four inches of hurricane water by crawling on top of his roommate’s dresser and crying because he didn’t know how to get any further away. He stood still, resisting the urge to touch his legs to see if they were cold again, like they’d been from the stormwater that flowed in through the walls. His breaths went shallow and quick. He went from a man to a panicky toddler with long legs, convinced he was destined to die facedown in a kiddie pool’s worth of water.

  Brittany clapped a hand on his shoulder.

  “I didn’t think so,” she said.

  The water in his head receded.

  She went back outside.

  Aaron watched Brittany dig and contemplated the perfectly reasonable contents of his go-bag: A thin, foldable fleece blanket for the cold. A tent. A water filter. A ham radio. A first-aid kit. A copy of The Thinking Man’s Guide to Self-Defense. Two flashlights. Two flares. A flint-and-steel set for when he inevitably needed to start a fire in a deserted postapocalyptic Brooklyn. A month’s worth of camo-colored Life Preservers in all-caps wrappers that loudly said eating two a day could reduce the risk of death. He went to the kitchen and grabbed a Life Preserver that hadn’t made it into a go-bag. He unwrapped and chewed and took in the optimized soy protein and felt his risk of kiddie-pool death lowering itself right on down to zero.

  He went back to the window and watched Brittany deepen the bunker hole. Aaron had picked up his walking habit from a third-grade friend he was allowed to walk around the block with after school back in Texas, and his short-lived bluegrass obsession from a bluegrass-obsessed friend in college. You hung out with people and they rubbed off on you. It was only natural that he’d become more like Brittany, since they lived together. He ate Life Preservers now. He had a go-bag. Was a bunker so bad? He could ignore it, just like he ignored her gun collection. She kept the guns in her bedroom, and her bedroom door shut. If he never saw them, they were almost not there. He didn’t have to look at the bunker. Sure, the bunker wouldn’t work in a hurricane, but they had a roof for that. If he ever had to go into the bunker he just wouldn’t think about it too much. He was the one who went around all unprepared for hurricanes, but Brittany had a plan for everything. If he didn’t have any plans, he might as well roll with hers. She’d turned him into a man who had thoughts about self-defense: namely, that if it all went to shit, he should defend himself. The bunker was just a self-defense building. He practiced coming to terms with it by looking at the hole and thinking of it as a brown, crumbly pair of brass knuckles.

  But the week before she started building the bunker, when it all went to shit for the two of them, he wasn’t even there. He was crawling around South America looking for beans when a masked weirdo in black spandex held Brittany up at gunpoint in the house for two pounds of coffee and a bag of frozen hash browns. Brittany gave a single interview about the break-in that she closed by saying that apparently they made coffee good enough to steal. They printed a run of baseball caps that said “Tactical Coffee” on the front and “Good Enough to Steal” on the back, and put them on stoops around Brooklyn, where people stole them, took pictures of them, and put those pictures online, as they’d intended. Their sales skyrocketed.

  After the break-in, Brittany shifted. She bought a doorbell that would annoy the dead, a video intercom system, and another two years’ worth of Life Preservers. She doubled her gun stash from four to eight. In the backyard, her bunker hole grew bigger. “For some reason I called the cops after the break-in,” she’d told Aaron the second he came back from his trip, with her right hand shaking around a mug of chamomile tea that she insisted was calming her down, “and they fucking laughed at me. ‘Are you sure you didn’t just rob yourself,’ one of them said. ‘Because, you know, sometimes your people like to take things.’ Yeah, I just took my own fucking coffee and hash browns and threw them in the garbage can at the end of the block and decided to get the cops involved anyway. No one gives a shit about Black people. All we have is ourselves.”

  Aaron couldn’t disagree with that. But he winced as she took them through the survivalist version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Of course the business should be secured. But not with guns. He spent half his free time lying on his bed trying to come up with some other way to protect themselves, and the other half soberly meeting women in bars who didn’t think about guarding themselves 100 percent of the time. They all seemed lovely and charming and a little soft, compared with Brittany. When he met Aretha and saw that same steel in her eyes a match lit up in his chest.

  Why did his mind blank itself out every time he tried to brainstorm how he and Brittany could protect themselves without turning into John Wick? He pictured alarm whistles. Mace. The black pepper his grandma put on their car to scare off cats. Could he switch Brittany into letting him sprinkle pepper on their delivery van for the human cats of the world? Probably not. They had to defend the business because people might be after them. With guns if they had to. It was what they had, this coffee that saved him from being an East Village charity case or an unemployed wanderer, ducking into shops to ask for a job, lasting five seconds, and finding himself back out on the street. He was proud of who he’d become and he wasn’t going to let a little hang-up over how to guard the house get in the way of that.

  He’d also learned to live with the version of Brittany who stood in her bedroom with her shades drawn, armed, running drills just in case anyone casually stopped by the house to shoot up a coffee company. Brittany acted as both the head of the numbers-and-money side of the business and the body woman, physically prepared to head off all the subsequent break-ins that never happened. Aaron had a lot of thoughts about her body-woman side when she first mentioned it to him, a week before they closed on the house. Thoughts like: Since it never works out when Black men want to arm themselves, why would a Black woman have a better chance of getting away with carrying guns?

  “I come from three generations of Black Massachusetts natives who successfully protected themselves from outsiders and each other,” she’d say, and when his eyes went wide at that, she worked him back down to the home-defense side of things.

  “Another intruder,” she said.

  “I’d punch ’em.”

  “Or her. Women can intrude too. We can do anything.”

  “OK, I’d punch her, too.”

  “You’d hit a woman?”

  “You’d shoot ’er?”

  “If I had to.”

  “Thing is, I’m six-four. When I make eye contact with most women I can see ’em tryin’ to figure out if I’m gonna tackle ’em next. I think I can handle whatever might come to our door.”

  “What if you’re not here? What if you’re in South America, sourcing beans again?”

  “You don’t believe in better door locks?”

  “What if they’re not enough?”

  Brittany had no fear that couldn’t suddenly balloon into a bigger fear. Aaron got tired of fighting her fears, the dark clouds that shaped their lives and filled what she called their defense budget, so he gave in to them. It wasn’t like he could turn himself into a snake plant and go back to 9th and C to live with his old roommate and that guy’s plant-freak girlfriend. If Brittany wanted to live in the Pentagon, he’d get used to the fifth wall. He put together the go-bag the first time she mentioned his hurricane to him. He watched her build the bunker with anguish, then indifference, then calm. When she went outside to dig, he watched her and mentally went over the house rules she’d insisted on when they moved in.

  “Why do we need house rules?” he’d said.

  “It’s best to spell out what we expect of each other while we live here.”

  “We won’t do fine just respectin’ each other’s space?”

  “See, Aaron, that’s so nebulous. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not specific.”

 

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